Multimedia consoles, such as video game consoles, have traditionally provided an operating system that “gets out of the way” of the developer. In particular, in conventional video game consoles the game developers are provided with near total control of the hardware and the operating system is driven by the multimedia application. As game software is often developed for a particular platform, the available hardware resources (e.g., memory, processor, etc.) and their characteristics (e.g., memory size, processor speed, etc.) are well known. This architecture provides developers complete autonomy and insight into how every CPU cycle is used. Thus, software developers can manage and maximize the usage of the hardware resources and provide a high performance multimedia application. For example, software game developers could be assured that the same amount of memory would always be available, that the CPU would not be consumed by another application or system feature introduced after the game was released, etc. The disadvantage to this approach is that any system functionality that is desired to be provided to the user, must be programmed into the multimedia application. This approach may require the multimedia developer to make significant investments in programming. Another drawback is that the user's experience may differ significantly among different multimedia applications because each multimedia application may provide its own particular user interface to system resources.
The other end of the continuum of resource control is found in the conventional personal computer (PC), in which applications typically have limited control over the underlying functionality of the operating system. This approach provides a large amount of functionality in the operating system, without requiring that it be controlled by the application. Further, this provides for multiple applications to run simultaneously without requiring them to be aware of each other. The drawback of this approach is that an application has much less control over each CPU cycle, and has to be architected to assume that it is not the only application running. As such, applications have no particular guarantee that they will get a certain amount of physical RAM or that they will not get starved by another application consuming significant amounts of CPU time.
As multimedia consoles grow in power there will probably be a greater demand to provide system services to multimedia applications while maintaining the benefits of existing multimedia console operating systems where developers have almost full control of system resources. Thus, there is a need for a system and method for providing system services in a multimedia console to enable more system functionalities, while maintaining the multimedia application's high level of control over the system operating and hardware resources.